


Just Stay Alive

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: AU witches, Alice Cooper death, Alternate Universe - Library, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Literature, Mentions of Cancer, Supernatural Elements, The one with the Frank Lloyd Wright house, so many books
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:41:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23927074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: Betty is trying to be a good daughter to a bad mother when she encounters a sad, lonely Jughead in a Frank Lloyd Wright house.  They establish a friendship through quotations which becomes something more. She learns his secret and he learns what life is really about.
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Veronica Lodge, Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 49
Kudos: 127





	1. Play Through the Pain

**Author's Note:**

> This is one for the book nerds. Any book nerds out there? Wow, that many…OK.  
> The title and chapter headings are from Spent Gladiator 2 on the album Transcendental Youth by The Mountain Goats. It’s not the most accessible track on that album which is, as always, a work of sublime genius. Maybe start with Harlem Roulette though.

Betty looked over the advertisement again. It simply would not do. There was no way she would allow this to be published. When she’d been pushed around and overlooked, she’d bitten her tongue and kept her head down but this was the tiny hill on which she was prepared to die. She put the ad to one side of the scrap of desk that she had been allocated in the corner of the office and picked up the restaurant review, amazed that the Register’s reporters could find anything new to say about two restaurants and a taco truck which were the only gastronomic offerings in town. Evidently they couldn’t. When Mr Douglas, the editor, passed her on his way to lunch she stood and caught his attention with a small, diffident gesture of her hand. “Excuse me Mr Douglas. This classified ad. I don’t think it can run.”

“Why not? Illegal?”

“Well, yes. I think so. Listen. “Situation Vacant. A literate and quiet young man is required for the cataloguing and divestment of a substantial library. It is of the first moment that the applicant should be able to work on his own recognisance. Apply in the first instance in writing to Mr J. Jones, Wood’s Fall, 295 Greendale Road, Riverdale, NY.”

“Just a job ad Ms Cooper. What’s the problem?”

“It’s obtuse and abstruse. He legally can’t require it to be a man unless there’s some reason for that. It’s discriminatory.”

“Oh, right. Well call him and OK the change. You know, obviously, that he’ll just choose a man if that’s what he wants but you do what you need to do so that crazy feminazis don’t turn up and shriek at me.”

Betty’s fists clenched as she tried to prevent herself from telling Douglas what he could do with his sexist language and his male privilege. “There’s no phone number, just an address. If I write there’s no way the ad makes the press this week.”

“Well drive out there then, Lois Lane. I see why he wants someone who can work on their own recognisance. Having to think for everyone is irritating. Now if you can cope with that task I’m going to lunch. I’ll be back late this afternoon.”

Betty reminded herself that she needed the job and sat back down to calm her breathing. She hadn’t expected to find herself back in Riverdale after having broken free. It wasn’t what she wanted but it was what it was and she just had to suck it up. She’d been making forward progress in New York. She’d graduated well and her internship at the New York Times had eventually become a permanent, if poorly paid, job. She had a tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn which she’d made her own with prints and fabrics. She had friends. Kevin was waiting both tables and to be discovered as the next Broadway star. Veronica was learning the fashion business in overheated ateliers and dragging Betty out to speakeasies that you accessed through bathroom stalls or refrigerator doors. She’d found that men liked her and she liked some of them. Her life was full and exciting. Then her mother had called.

Alice hadn’t told Betty when she found the lump. She ignored it for three months and then she saw her doctor. The three months might have made a difference and Betty was mad about that. Alice didn’t tell Betty when she had surgery or when she began chemo. She waited until the doctor told her that the treatment had been unsuccessful, that the cancer had spread and that she should try to focus on her quality of life in the time she had left. Her mother wept on the phone and told her that she was so sorry that she hadn’t been a better mother at the precise moment when, had she refused her forgiveness Betty would have been the villain. The next day she handed in her notice, gave up the lease on the little apartment with the blue door and made plans to move back to Riverdale to care for her dying mother for as long as was necessary. 

She had expected to be spending her days nursing Alice but it turned out that there was excellent home hospice care which was covered by her insurance. Her mother needed her for emotional support and reassurance much more than for nursing. Betty found her days empty, stressful and frustrating and so she looked for work in the business that she knew best. The Riverdale Register needed a junior sub editor and, although it was a long way from the news desk at the New York Times, Betty accepted the terrible contract and the humiliation so that she could feel useful again. Mr Douglas said he understood that there would be other demands on Betty’s time, that she might have to call in at short notice if her mother needed her, but whenever it happened he liked to make it seem that he was granting her an undeserved boon. He didn’t like her to mention The Times; it made his very provincial efforts seem trivial, and so he rejected her suggestions for stories out of hand. “You’re a sub editor Ms Cooper. Pay attention to the semi colons please. That’s your field now.” It was not what she had imagined that she’d be doing at this stage of her career but she was determined that she wouldn’t be a bad daughter even to a bad mother.

Once Douglas had departed for his long lunch, Betty grabbed the keys to her mother’s station wagon and set off on the Greendale Road to talk to Mr Jones about his nineteenth century attitudes. What with one thing and another she was just about ready to meet some crusty old misogynist and put him right about a few things.

It took her far longer than she expected to find Wood’s Fall. She’d thought that she knew every pothole in every street in Riverdale, having been born and raised right in the town. She knew that Ethel Muggs had moved into 294 Greendale Road after her dad lost his business and she had always assumed that there were no properties any further out of town. It seemed that she was wrong. She drove out past the Muggs’ house almost to Greendale itself before coming upon 296, a tumble down place with a tattered flag and an honest to god lawn jockey. Jones’ sexism and 296’s racism as next door neighbours intrigued Betty. Perhaps there was something in the water. She turned the vehicle and drove back towards Riverdale, slowly, searching. There was no way she was going to tell Douglas that she hadn’t been able to perform this simple task. Suddenly, there was the turning she had missed before. It was much more apparent from this direction, almost like the house was hiding from Riverdalians. A discreet sign alongside the turn read “295 Jones ABSOLUTELY NO HAWKERS.” As a young woman with a degree in English Betty understood the import of the message but she imagined that most peddlers or costermongers would not have recognised the description as referring to themselves. The sign was so pretentious that it negated its own purpose. Her impression of “Jones” was becoming more damning with every new piece of evidence.

The house tried to reverse her negative impression. It was simply beautiful. It belonged in the Architectural Digest. It was low with dynamically shaped eaves that overhung the walls, it was surrounded by trees, nestling organically into its space, its materials seeming to blend with the local textures and colours. There were huge walls of glass, reflecting the trees, making the roof seem to float in a forest. Betty had written an article for the Times about a woman who had fallen in love with the George Washington Bridge. She hadn’t really been able to sympathise until this moment. She loved this house. She stood, absorbing its beauty for a moment before remembering her errand and approaching the front door. The door knocker was a rectangle of aged copper with a base plate of the same material etched with an infinity symbol. She rapped and waited and then rapped again. Perhaps Jones was away. She searched in her purse for a piece of paper to leave a note, dropping her keys on the floor as she did so. Of course it had to be then that he opened the door, as she knelt on the threshold, hands outstretched reaching for her keys, as if she had come to sing paeans to him or to the house or perhaps to both. 

She met him from the feet up as her gaze travelled up his body. There were bare feet, nails neatly trimmed, skin smooth and olive toned. The ankles were slim, then naked calves muscular but not bulky. The edge of a silk robe, a paisley pattern in blue and gold, His hands hung by his hips, his fingers long and thin with prominent knuckles, the hands of a pianist. His waist was slim, defined by the belt of the robe, his shoulders broad. His neck was the tower of ivory from the sexiest book of the bible. His face though, his face made her rock back onto her heels in shock. He was young, maybe twenty five and he was simply the most beautiful man she had ever seen. High cheekbones, a jawline with sharp definition, a straight nose. His eyebrows were a work of art, dark, elegantly curved, one raised in enquiry above the bluest eyes she had ever seen. His dark wavy hair was swept back from his face in damp swirls, fresh from the shower she guessed. There she was, on her knees in front of him, his robe secured only with that silken tie. Embarrassing yes, but simultaneously arousing. Then he spoke and his irritated tone broke the spell. “Is there something you want now that you’ve disturbed me or are you just going to stare at me as if I were an exhibit at a carnival?”

“Yes, sorry, I dropped my keys.” She struggled to her feet, feeling the power dynamic keenly as he continued to tower above her even when she was upright. “I’m Betty Cooper. I work at the Register.” He looked blankly at her. “The Riverdale Register, the newspaper in town. You placed an advertisement.”

“Yes, fine. What of it?” His impatience was understandable she guessed since he was still wet from his interrupted shower. 

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Do you want me to wait while you dress or something?”

“No, just tell me what you want so that you can leave and I can forget you were here.”

He was exactly as rude and supercilious as Betty had expected and she was beginning to feel aggrieved again. “Well we can’t run your advertisement because it is discriminatory, illegal and wrong. Either you can allow me to change it to omit reference to age and gender or I will refund your fee.”

“Fine, just as you please. I cannot imagine that there are older people or females who would tolerate my employ for a day let alone for long enough to complete the task but if they wish it I will consider them. Is that all?”

Betty hardly knew why she said it but the house was exerting a magnetic attraction and she very much wanted to see inside. He was just awful but so beautiful that she wanted to continue to look at him. She hated her job at the Register. She loved books. “May I see the library? I could catalogue it. I have a degree in English from Columbia.”

There was a ghost of a smile which passed across his features like a wisp of cloud across the moon and was gone. “Well, you certainly have an interesting approach to applying for a situation Miss Cooper. As I said I don’t imagine that a young woman would enjoy the position but I wouldn’t want to deprive you of your constitutional right to hate me. Please, this way.” He led her through a huge open space with a two sided fireplace and low couches, towards the back of the house. 

“Your home is incredible Mr Jones. It’s stunning.”

He looked back at her curiously. “I’m sure Mr Lloyd Wright would be delighted by your endorsement Miss Cooper. He knew himself to be the greatest architect in the world but I’m sure the admiration of a junior newspaper employee would be a huge boost to his self esteem.”

Betty flushed and swallowed her anger and embarrassment. He lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house and he couldn’t even take a compliment without being a complete ass. Still she hated Douglas so what difference did it make which entitled white male was demeaning and patronising her? “So, Miss Cooper, with the glittering accolade of a degree from Columbia why have you chosen to hide your light under a bushel here in Riverdale?”

“I was working at the New York Times but my mother is dying. I came home to take care of her.” Normally she would have sweetened that pill a little. People didn’t like it when you mentioned death like that but he was a dick and didn’t deserve her consideration.

“Your filial duty does you credit. You must love your mother very dearly to sacrifice so much for her.”

“Not really.” Betty had decided not to use her filter at all. He certainly didn’t hold back so why should she? “I refuse to let her treatment of me choose my path. She doesn’t deserve my care but I choose to give it to her, unconditionally. There’s nothing that she can do to me anymore, not steal my college fund, not shame me about my body, not try to control me, nothing, and my forgiveness demonstrates her total lack of power.”

Now he was looking at her with greater interest. “Intriguing. You seem to have found a way to weaponise love. Is there more to you than meets the eye Miss Cooper or are you vanilla milkshake all through?”

“Edmond Albius,” retorted Betty. She wasn’t going to be talked down to by this douche. If she came over as an insufferable smartass then so be it.

“I’m sorry?”

“People always think vanilla is boring but almost all vanilla is hand pollinated. The industry depends on it. The only technique to do it was invented in the 1800s by a twelve year old slave called Edmond Albius. His mother died in childbirth, he invented the pollination technique, was emancipated when slavery ended in French territories, he was a kitchen hand, got imprisoned for theft, had his sentence commuted…Dull? Things are only boring when you don’t know enough about them.”

He laughed at that and Betty gasped in spite of herself. His laugh was glorious. His face was a work of art all the time but when it was animated it was transcendent. Her fingers twitched with the desire to touch him, to run them through the drying curls, to stroke her hand along his jaw, to place her lips against his. He was leading her onwards again and she hoped that she hadn’t given herself away. “Here we are Miss Cooper. The library.”

It was an enormous space, double height with library ladders and a gallery. One wall was glass, the others exposed stone and closely fitted bookshelves. There were three desks, each with a banker’s lamp casting a pool of light. There had to be hundreds of thousands of volumes. This was not a short term project. “Why do you want to sell your books?” she asked in some dismay, hardly able to conceive of such a grievous loss.

“Oh I don’t want to sell them. I plan to give them away. I contacted my own Alma Mater but Harvard told me that they could not accept such a large collection. There are issues of space apparently. So the books need to be catalogued and then offered to institutions where they will be of use. If none will accept them then they will be sold and the funds donated.”

“But why?”

The explanation he produced seemed rehearsed and inauthentic. “Have you seen the broadcasts by the charming Japanese lady? She tells me that my possessions must “spark joy” or I must dispose of them. The books no longer fulfil that function. They were almost the last thing that did… but no longer. So the task is an arduous one. I would leave you to it. You would have a key, and may set your own hours, I would be grateful if you consulted me as little as possible. Is it a position that you would be interested in accepting?”

“The salary?”

“Oh, remuneration, of course. Would $5000 a month meet your requirements?” Betty tried to cover her shock. It was a more than she had been earning in New York but here in Riverdale she had no overheads to speak of. She could save at last.

“Yes, that would be acceptable. Do you need my references?”

“No, I pride myself on being a good judge of character. Of course if you should rob me I would hunt you down and kill you.” There was a tight, mirthless smile on his face and she was not at all sure that he was joking but she smiled in return. He opened a drawer and handed her a key, showing her the rear door which led more directly to the library. “Please don’t wander the house Miss Cooper. I value my privacy and would be grateful if you would respect it. When can you begin?”

As she drove back into town her emotions were in turmoil. She tried to catalogue them as she would the books. There was admiration for the glorious house and the exceptional library. She almost added Jones to the list of things she admired but if she was to be honest her appreciation of him was not purely an aesthetic matter. She didn’t like him one bit but she would have enjoyed hate sex with him if he were to offer it. The scratching, biting, cursing kind of hate sex that let you take what you needed without concerning yourself with the ego or emotional fragility of the other party, the selfish kind of sex that she never allowed herself to have. So hate and lust in equal parts. Then there was satisfaction that she could quit her job at the register. She considered doing that by simply giving Douglas the finger from a moving vehicle but decided that she needed to be a little more circumspect in case the Jones thing didn’t work out. Alongside all of that there was both excitement about spending her days in that heart stompingly beautiful room with the fascinating books alongside trepidation. What if he turned out to be a sex pest or if she discovered a stash of unspeakable pornography amongst the volumes? She took a deep breath and headed into the office to politely give her notice.

That weekend she was telling Archie about the new job over a vanilla milkshake at Pop’s. They didn’t meet often. It was always hard for Betty being friends with both him and Veronica after their acrimonious split and he was so busy with the youth centre and his social work classes at the community college. He asked if she had heard from his ex and she told him that Veronica was in Paris for a two month placement, learning pattern cutting from an expert at Givenchy. He smiled resolutely and asked to be remembered to her. “She’s never going to forget you Arch. Maybe one day you’ll find your way back.”

“Two different paths Betty. We just can’t bring them together no matter how hard we try. Anyway tell me about the new job.”

Archie was as surprised as her to hear about Wood’s Fall. He’d never heard of the house and seemed not to believe that it could exist in Riverdale without him knowing it. His dad had run the town’s main construction firm and they’d worked almost everywhere. In the end she drove him out there to prove the point and missed the turn once again. She spun round and found it easily on the way back. It would get old pretty fast if she couldn’t find her way to work every day. Archie was irritated by the existence of this interloping house in his town and resolved to ask his dad’s buddies about it. His curiosity sparked hers. At home later she asked her mom about it when she was lucid between doses of morphine and sleep. “Yes, I remember it. My grandmother used to talk about it often. She had been good friends with a boy who lived there way back in the forties. I forget his name. Something unusual. She remembered when the house was built. When I was in high school I got a friend to drive me out there. I was reporting for the Blue and Gold just like you used to. I thought I could run a feature on the architecture but when we got up to the door the owner just ran us off the place, threatening to call the police. He was so rude. I hope your new boss isn’t like that.”

“No, he’s very nice Momma. No need to worry.” 

She began her new job nervously. She did not see her employer but she felt like Jonathan Harker, dreading the sound of the footstep outside the door that would herald the arrival of the fearsome Count himself. He did not appear; in fact she heard nothing that would suggest that he was even at home and slowly she began to relax into a pleasant routine. The library was ordered chronologically by publication date which was an eccentric choice but there was at least method to it. Many of the volumes were valuable first editions and she ordered archivists’ gloves online to handle them. She began to notice that many of the books were annotated in the margins in a fine looping script. The comments revealed a sensitive and discriminating reader who loved Shakespeare. Many passages were underscored in different colours of ink implying that they returned to them over and over again. Hamlet was unsurprisingly dogeared and well read and the favourite passages seemed to be “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams,” and “To die: to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.” They had underscored the latter so deeply that the page was torn. Betty worked on the cataloguing in the mornings, took her lunch on a low stone bench outside the library windows and then, in the afternoon, contacted librarians at universities across the country to establish their procedures for accepting gifts and bequests.

By Friday, instead of Harker Betty was beginning to feel a little like Belle, all alone in the beautiful house but without even a teapot for conversation. She decided that she would round off the week by writing a brief report on her work for her employer should he deign to enter the library over the weekend. She detailed which section was catalogued and referred him to the software she was using for the task and the cloud storage where he could peruse the work in progress. On a whim she ended the report with a quotation about loving and losing a library from The Tempest “Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”

On Monday when she returned to her desk she found the report that she had left, apparently untouched. Clearly, she thought, he had no interest in the work or the library and she picked up the pages to dispose of them. She stopped when she saw there was a note written at the end in heavy block capitals. “I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And, deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my book.” He countered her with another line from the same play. It seemed like a conversation even if it was a bitter, sad one. 

As the weeks progressed she learned something of the mysterious reader’s tastes.They had a particular distaste for Paradise Lost. Alongside the description of Satan with his sword and shield they had written “Absurd. Satan is fought in the heart not on the battlefield.” They didn’t care for Spenser or for Pope but liked Donne and Marlowe. A romantic, sometimes bawdy sensibility then. 

In Wuthering Heights they had underscored her own favourite passage “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” Next to it was written, “This is remarkable. Surely Elis Bell is a woman? Can a man ever feel so deeply?” The implication was that the annotation had been made contemporaneously with the pseudonymous publication but there were much later volumes annotated in the same handwriting. Was it possible for someone so well read not to know that Emily Brontë was the true author of Wuthering Heights? In the volume of Emily Dickinson there were dots under the words like the ones that she made when she was learning a poem by heart. The underlining of the poem “The Loneliness One Dare not Sound” was black and emphatic and she felt a pang of sympathy for the reader. She could barely imagine loneliness so desperate that it was described as “ The Horror not to be surveyed—But skirted in the Dark.” 

Each week she would make a short report on her progress and end it with a quotation that had struck her during the work. Each week Jones would reply with a corresponding quotation. From A Christmas Carol she wrote “There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.” He matched her Dickens with “It is too late for that. I shall never be better than I am. I shall sink lower, and be worse,” from A Tale of Two Cities. From Hawthorne she chose “We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.” to which he replied, also from The Scarlet Letter “I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!” From Whitman she offered “Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.” and he replied “To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” She wasn’t sure if this was a game or if he was as depressed and filled with self hatred as he seemed from his selection. Since their only method of communication was the quotation she persisted. She tried Henry Miller, offering “Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.” only to get “I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion” and to drive the point home, “Words are loneliness.” The library copy of On The Road was foxed, dog-eared and water damaged. It seemed to be someone’s favourite so from it she selected “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” And he replied “My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realised no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.” Her heart broke a little for him when she read it.


	2. A Small Town To Escape To

As the weeks passed in their strange, oblique conversation, Betty’s mother faded. In the spring she had been well enough to sit up in the early evening, even to step out into the yard if it was warm to enjoy the sun on her face. By June she could barely sit up in bed. Her medication kept her comfortable but distant, unable to participate in her life. Betty was grateful for the distraction of the library and for the eccentric proxy companionship of her employer. On the Wednesday after the Kerouac correspondence she finally did hear his footfall pause outside the door of the library. The interaction by quotation had made her less anxious about encountering him, although weeks of not seeing him had, she imagined, allowed her to exaggerate his physical attractiveness in her mind. The door opened and he stood hesitantly on the threshold. She hadn’t exaggerated. If anything he was more attractive than she remembered. He wore faded blue jeans and a white t shirt with a pack of cigarettes tucked into the fold of the sleeve like no one had done since about 1955. His hair fell forward over his forehead in glossy waves, his eyes were the same blue as his jeans. She stared at him and then dropped her gaze in confusion. “Miss Cooper, you’re well?”

“Yes, thank you. I’m almost finished with the prose fiction. I expect to begin the poetry next week.”

“And your mother?”

“She’s peaceful. The nurse says no more than three months, maybe much less.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s OK. She isn’t suffering. We’ve got to acceptance I think.”

“Ah yes, the stages of grief. Well if there’s anything…you know.”

“Was there something you wanted. Any instructions?”

“No, no. Just checking in.” He looked uncomfortable for a moment. “Well, just one thing. Can you put aside the Kerouac. Not dispose of that.”

She smiled broadly. “Does it spark joy, Mr Jones?”

“Well if not quite that, it sparks a remembrance of joy. Perhaps that’s all that can be hoped for.”

“Ginsberg? Burroughs?” she suggested cheekily.

His embarrassment presented itself as impatience. “Yes, fine. Keep all the Beats then. Good afternoon Miss Cooper.” He strode back through the doorway and was gone. And Betty found that she wanted to find more things that sparked the remembrance of joy. It was a project and Betty Cooper loved a project.

It was mainly poetry that could elicit a reaction. She would offer a line in her note on a Friday and just sometimes when he offered a corresponding line he would add “To be retained,” and she would grin or punch the air in triumph. He liked William Carlos Williams, Ted Hughes, T S Eliot, Shelley, Coleridge, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton. He began to add things to the list to be retained that she didn’t suggest. “Please keep the Whitman” she read one Monday. The next day there was another note, “In vain have I struggled… Fuck it, I’ll keep the Austen.” She laughed at that. At lunchtime, as she was about to step outside with her brown bag lunch, he appeared again at the door. “Miss Cooper, I wondered if perhaps you might care to join me for some lunch? If you’d rather not…”

“No, Mr Jones. I’d like that. Thank you.”

“Please, this way.” He led her through to a kitchen with cedar cabinets and a huge island in the same wood. He pulled out a stool for her. “I hope you don’t mind the informality. I find the kitchen more agreeable for a light meal.” He brought a platter of tomatoes stuffed with goat’s cheese to the table alongside a selection of salads. Her face must have shown her surprise. “I taught myself to cook several years ago, as a kind of hobby. I know many young women these days choose not to consume meat so I avoided it. Was that right?” 

His tone and his mode of expression was so incongruous with his youth that it made her smile. “You speak like my grandfather Mr Jones and he’s been dead fifteen years. Did you have a very traditional education?”

“It was extremely old fashioned.” He smiled to himself as he said this. “Tell me, what was it about what I said that struck you particularly? I’d like to try to update my expression if I can.” He was passing her serving plates as they spoke and she realised that it was ages since she had eaten with a companion, Archie was too busy and too sad for Pop’s, her mother was too sick to keep anything down. She was enjoying the companionship.

“Well you’re a young guy, what twenty five or so? But you say “young women” like you’re so much older than that. Normally someone your age would say “girls” or even “chicks.” Although if they did say chicks they’d be flagging themselves as an asshat. And no-one under sixty says “agreeable” in that context. You’d normally just say “nice” or something.”

“Well I have no intention of introducing the word “nice” in that sense into my vocabulary. It means subtle or slight to me, not a bland term of approval. I have a horror of blandness; I would far rather have something actively distasteful than fine or acceptable or passable. As Confucius has it “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.””

“Yeah, that tracks. You were pretty rude when I came about the job. You’re not really into social niceties are you?”

“I apologise if I was a boor Miss Cooper. I am subject to melancholy and I was not at my best for... some time. “The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe.”” he intoned dramatically. “But I feel much better today,” he added with a quick, wry smile of heartbreaking vulnerability.

“Mr Jones, if you live with depression you really need to not read The Road. That’s not going to help. That book would make anyone feel like jumping off a bridge.”

“Well I thought nothing would help. I suppose that goes with the territory although it’s hard to remember that when you’re in it. It’s like trying to repair a flashlight by only the light of the same broken flashlight. You need to fix your mind but you’ve only got your mind to do it with. But I wanted to thank you. Your notes helped. Once I could laugh at Austen again I realised I was getting better. Those tiny morsels of beauty and understanding were as much as I could stomach but they gave me a little strength and I could climb out of the pit in which I was languishing. Thank you. It was kind when you had no reason to be kind.”

“Well I’m glad it was of use. The library was an inspiration. Are you having second thoughts about dispersing it? Whoever collected it had wonderful taste. And what a reader they were. Was it a member of your family?”

“No, most of it can go. I will keep a few special things, the things that speak to me but I don’t need the Shakespeare. That’s all here.” He tapped his forehead.

“Go on then…” she raised an eyebrow.  
“I’m sorry?”

“If you have all that Shakespeare in your head, give me something.”

“Very well.” He gave her a rather smug smile and launched into “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.”

“Is that Lear? Edmund?” He smiled and nodded, pleased that she recognised it. “Oh, you actually do know it don’t you? Was it literature at Harvard?”

“No, I actually studied for the clergy. But I’ve always liked to read.”

“You’re religious?” Betty’s head spun trying to reconcile all the elements of his personality. The devotion to the Beats seemed wildly at odds with a religious disposition.

“Not at all. I guess you could say I lost my faith. I read Dostoevsky and Primo Levi and decided that if there was a God he was certainly not worthy of worship. Are you a person of faith Miss Cooper?” 

“Mr Jones, is there any way you could call me Betty? The Miss Cooper thing just feels so weird. Is that inappropriate?”

“No, not at all. I go by Jughead, my given name is unwieldy. I would like to to be on friendly terms Betty, although I’m somewhat out of practice.” He held out his elegant hand and she took it in hers, confused by the bizarre name, surprised by how warm his hand was and by how strongly she could feel a pulse thrumming through his palm in the handshake. 

They traded quotations, talked about their favourite writers, argued a little about God and finished the meal shortly before four in the afternoon. Betty was shocked when she looked at the clock. “Mr Jones, I’m so sorry. The library. I’ve done nothing all afternoon.”

“Jughead. And you’ve made me forget some of my troubles which is more than anyone has done for me in longer than I can remember. Why don’t you finish for today and start fresh in the morning? Thank you Betty, it was a good afternoon. I’ll remember it. For a long time.”

Betty thought about Jughead Jones all the way home and then as she lay on the couch watching a box set on her laptop. Was he doing just this at this moment? It seemed unlikely. More probably he was sitting in the pool of light cast by one of those banker’s lights reading Austen and chuckling to himself. She drifted off into a dream where she stepped into the library, dressed in a chiffon robe out of a Victoria’s Secret fever dream. She stood behind him, placing a hand on his neck and he turned with a smile and lust in his clear, intelligent eyes. He stroked the robe from her shoulders and she stood there, naked before him, amongst the books as he smiled at her and leaned his fine head to kiss her neck. She woke with a gasp and sat up. Now that was inconvenient. She couldn’t crush on her boss, especially if he was going to start cooking her lunch and being amusing and charming instead of rude and grouchy. 

She didn’t see him at all for the rest of the week which was both a relief and a terrible disappointment. On Friday instead of leaving him a quotation from one of his books she left him something that his library did not contain, her own copy of Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore with a post it note marking her favourite passage, “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” All weekend she wondered if she had overstepped some invisible boundary. To give someone a book is intimate. To give them your book, with your notes, is to show them your soul. 

On Saturday morning she was catching up with yard work, marvelling at the amount there was to do given that she had never noticed it for a moment as she was growing up. Archie looked over the fence and waved and she put the rake aside and wandered over. Had they somehow become companionable, suburban neighbours like their parents had been? “How’s your course going?” she asked.

“Books. They always did kick my ass, right from first grade, remember?”

“Of course. But you’re motivated now. There’s about sixty really good reasons to keep going,” she smiled, reminding him of the kids that the youth centre fed everyday who would otherwise go to bed hungry.

“Hey, I asked around about the creepy ass secret house. Kev’s gramps says he got chased out of there when he was a kid. Apparently the owner called up his dad and complained about him, told him to keep away. Old Mr K says his dad never yelled at him but that once. Said that “Jug-head” would whup his ass if he caught him there again. That was the owner’s name apparently. Weird right? Jug-head? What the hell?” Betty agreed it was weird and they chatted about Kevin’s stop start theatre career for a few minutes before getting back to their tasks. Jughead was a weird name she mused, and perhaps even weirder to be a family name. Was the Jughead who had threatened Old Mr Keller her Jughead’s grandfather? Perhaps his great-grandfather? She wondered if he’d tell her if she asked him. If the family had always lived there why hadn’t he gone to Riverdale High with them? She supposed he had been expensively educated, perhaps at Stonewall Prep.

On Monday when she let herself into the library he was there before her, sprawled in an armchair, one leg hitched over the arm, surrounded by the complete works of Murakami. “Betty, why haven’t I read this? It’s brilliant and confusing and trippy and marvellous. I feel like I did when I read Ginsberg for the first time. Thanks so much for it.”

“What’s your favourite?”

“Well I really like the one you left me but I think the Wind Up Bird is my favourite. I love the well. I know, let’s go out and do something. I’ve been reading all weekend, my limbs are atrophying. We’ll take the bike. Come on!”  
“Wait, what about the library? I haven’t got time to…”

“Oh, sweet Betty. Believe me when I tell you that I have more than enough time for both of us. I am extraordinarily time-rich. I mean, I’m rich-rich too but I’m pretty much the Henry Rockefeller...I mean the Bill Gates of time-rich.” He was silly and giddy and she had no idea what he was talking about but his mood was infectious so she went with him.

He pushed a vintage motorbike out from the garage, shrugged on a leather jacket with a snake insignia on the back and passed its twin over to her along with a helmet. As he waited for her, astride the bike, he had to know that it was a pretty irresistible look, part Marlon Brando, part River Phoenix. “Are you doing that on purpose?” she asked sharply.

“What?”he asked innocently.

“Looking like a movie star to turn a girl’s head.”

His lip twitched, amused that she would be so direct. “Why? Is it working?”

“I don’t believe that it’s ever failed. Has it ever failed?”

“I’m single and I’m older than you think so I suppose no-one’s head was ever really turned. ” He was laughing now the dark curls shaking with mirth and that only made it harder to resist him. She put on the helmet and swung her leg over the bike behind him. He’d been planning this. To have her so close, pressed up behind him, was going to make her putty in his hands and she suspected they both knew it. 

They sat together later on the bank of the Sweetwater River dangling their feet into the water. “How come you’re so rich-rich? Do you have wealthy parents? Old money?” she asked at last.

“Very old money. But my parents are long dead. They would be unable to even imagine my life. They thought that I would live a life like theirs, on the edges of poverty and criminality. That was what fate had in store for me I’m sure, but I met a woman when I was only twenty years old and she had a different vision for me entirely.”  
“Tell me about her. Did you love her?”

“I didn’t know what that meant. Perhaps I still don’t. She loved me though, in her way. She wanted me and she took me and she did all she could to keep me. But eventually, with a great deal of suffering, she came to understand that love you have to buy and threaten and bribe and cry to keep is not love at all. So with sadness and anger she let me go. But she gave me a dark, terrible gift. I’ll never ever be what I was before her. I can never go home. My life can never mean anything now. I’ll never have purpose. That’s a terrible thing to take from a person. Perhaps I deserved it but I was twenty and didn’t understand anything.’

“She was older?” He laughed at that.  
“Yes, she was little older. Not as old as I am now but older.”

‘How old are you? You can’t be more than…” She was about to say twenty six but he turned and looked at her with those intense blue eyes and she saw centuries in them. They were eyes that had seen the rise and fall of empires. 

“Believe me when I tell you that I am much, much older than I look.”

“Will you tell me?” She looked into those old eyes, ready to hear what he would share with her.

“Perhaps I will, one day.” He smiled at her softly.

“You seem lonely.” She murmured, touching the back of his hand as it rested beside her on the river bank.

He grinned, breaking the mood. “I’m Mr Rochester. I’m Heathcliff. I might even be Holden Caulfield.”  
She picked up on the self mocking tone and smiled back. “Oh stop! You’re nothing like any of them. They aren’t real people, they’re tropes. And they’re dicks. Heathcliff’s a necrophiliac for God’s sake, Rochester’s a bigamist. Caulfield is a whiny egotist with delusions of grandeur. You don’t have to be them Jughead. As my friend Veronica always says “You do you gurrl.”

“How do I stop being a trope then Betty? Help me.”

“Let’s analyse the texts. That’s your thing. What should Heathcliff have done? Other than not have sex with the corpse of his dead ex.”

“Whenever I read it I always hope that this time he’ll yell at Cathy. Tell her that she hurt him, that marrying Linton will be a disaster for her as well as everyone else. Unsurprisingly he never does.”

“Yes! Because he has to be all grand gesture-y. “Oh you’ve wounded me so I’ll show you.” Tendency to the dramatic. Ring any bells with you?”

“Guilty as charged. What about Rochester? Can you fix him?”

“Well he’s kind of a cipher isn’t he? She’s saying sexy men will ruin your life, let’s maim and castrate them to make them safe husbands. She wants to punish him for all the ways men screw women over. If they aren’t total asshats then men should be able to be sexy. You don’t have to live out her revenge fantasy.”

“Is the implication that I’m a sexy man then?” He raised one flirtatious eyebrow, it made her quiver. He left the question hanging. “Hey, I’m hungry. Are you hungry? Is Pop’s still going?”

They were just settling into a booth when Betty’s phone rang. Her mother’s nurse told her that she should come at once. Jughead dropped her outside her front door, unsure if he should come in or allow her some privacy. “It’s OK Jug. I’ll call you. Thank you. Oh the car!”

“Give me the keys. I’ll get it brought round.” She passed him her mother’s keychain, a gold letter A swinging from it, hurting her heart.

She heard the roar of the bike fade away as she entered her mother’s room. The nurse put a hand on her arm and murmured “She’s fading fast dear. If you have anything to say, this is the time.”

“Momma? It’s Betty. I’m here.” She took her mother’s hand and sat on the chair next to the bed. She thought her mother’s eyelids flickered but she couldn’t be sure. Her brother Charles had visited dutifully a couple of times but his work as an FBI agent kept him in Washington most of the time. She had no idea where Polly and her kids were. “I’m sorry it’s just me Momma. I know you’d rather have either of the others. I’m sorry that I wasn’t what you hoped for. I forgive you. I hope you forgive me.” Alice’s breathing slowed as Betty sat by the bed until it was barely perceptible. 

Eventually, at around three in the morning, the nurse touched her patient’s neck for a long solemn moment, looked at Betty and whispered, “She’s gone honey. Do you want someone to come over to be with you?” Betty shook her head. Unfortunately the only person she wanted was her boss and that seemed wildly inappropriate, especially in the early hours. The nurse took complete charge, sending Betty to bed and promising to call the doctor and the funeral home in the morning. She lay stiff and still in bed, thinking about her mother’s body growing cold, her eyes never to look critically at Betty again, her voice gone forever from the world, missing her far more than she ever imagined she would. Eventually, she got up and pulled on sweat pants and an old Riverdale High cheer hoodie to wait for the funeral home to come and take charge of Alice’s mortal remains. While she waited she sent Jughead a text. “My mother passed last night. I hope it is OK for me to take a personal day to put things in order. I will come to work tomorrow.” 

Thirty seconds later her phone pinged. “I’m out front. Can I do anything?” She ran to the window. There he was, in Alice’s station wagon, looking down at his phone. Betty let herself out of the door and walked over to the vehicle.

“What are you doing here? How long have you been here?” She was asking these irrelevant questions when all she wanted to ask was, “Will you put your arms around me?”

“I drove your car over last night, in case you needed it. I was going to run home but somehow I just ended up sitting here. In case you needed me or…I don’t know. I just couldn’t seem to leave. I’m very sorry about your mother Betty.”

“It’s OK. I was prepared for it.” she began, and then she was sobbing, holding her arms crossed over her stomach and bending forward in pain. He was out of the car and his arms were around her in a second and he helped her up the path into the house. He sat on Alice’s couch with her, stroking her back and murmuring words of comfort. The funeral director came and Jughead took charge, setting an appointment for Betty to go and choose a casket and make the funeral arrangements the next day. Then he was back on the couch with her, passing her a cup of sweet tea and stroking her hair while she cried out her anger and frustration. “We just didn’t understand each other Jughead. And now we never will. I have no-one. My sister’s in the wind, my brother only has time for his job. My friends are all so wrapped up in their own lives and their own troubles that we don’t even communicate. I’ve got no home, my career is over before it began, no family to speak of.”

“You’ve got me Betty. Here I am. Lean on me. I’ve got you.”

“You’re being too kind to me. I’m just an employee.”

He looked at her with hurt in his eyes at that. “I hope I’m your friend Betty. You gave me a book. That’s friendship, isn’t it? I’d like to help. Please let me.”

She looked into his generous and compassionate eyes and rested her head against his shoulder. Soon she drifted off to sleep, warmer and safer than she had felt in months. When she woke she was on the couch with a blanket over her and she could hear him moving around in the kitchen. It was incongruous. He was somehow too fine, too exotic for the ordinary surroundings. He smiled tenderly at her when she stood in the doorway. “Good sleep?”

“Yes, I feel much better. Thank you. I’m sorry I was such a flake.” 

“You were hardly that. Now I’ve made soup which is a cliché but it’s a cliché for a reason. Soup almost always helps.” In a small town word travels fast and Archie stopped by to pay his respects late in the afternoon, was suspicious of Jughead and invited Betty to stay at his house but Betty told him she was fine at home. Some of the neighbour ladies brought casseroles and Betty just knew that the handsome young man at Alice’s house before she was even cold would be the main topic of conversation on Elm Street. Betty called Charles to tell him the news and he promised to try to get to the funeral. As days after deaths do the hours crept by, measured out in cups of tea and sad, meandering conversation but all the way through it there was Jughead. She was leaning against him on the couch as the light faded from the sky.

“Can you stay? I’d just rather not be alone.”

“Of course. Whatever you need. Where are your linens? I’ll make up a bed.”

“Could you just stay with me? I don’t mean…Is that weird?”

“No, not weird. Of course.”

She slept against his warm chest, wrapped in the scent of tobacco and coffee that seemed to always accompany him even though she hadn’t noticed him going outside to smoke. She woke in the night, wanting him, seeing that his eyes were open, reaching down to find him hard. He grasped her wrist as she stroked him, stilling her hand. “There’s no way I’m having sex with a girl that just lost her mother Betts. No way in the world, no matter how much I want to. Be good and go to sleep.” He kissed her chastely on the forehead, holding onto her hands until she drifted back to sleep. When they woke in the morning something had shifted between them. Although he had rejected her advances there was a sense of as yet unfulfilled promise between them. She was planning a funeral though so they didn’t speak about it.


	3. The Nagging Flash of Insight

Alice Smith was buried on a gloriously sunny September morning. The service was well attended and nobody said any of the mean things that Betty knew they would have been justified in saying. They used words like “vibrant”, "a force of nature”, “her own person”. After the ceremony and a wake at Elm Street where Charles took charge as if he’d organised it, she sat with Jughead on the porch. “People were sweet about her Jug. They didn’t have to be. She could be mean and spiteful and hypocritical. At my funeral I just want them to say that I was kind. That’s all I want to be. I’m going to try harder.”

“You’re already kind Betts. You’re one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. I was nothing but vile to you and yet you tried to connect with me. You have a generous spirit.”

“Thank you Jug. That means a lot. What do you want them to say at your funeral?”

“Oh if they could just say that I was dead it would be great.” It was a strange joke and he didn’t say it as if it were one. She looked at him quizzically.

“A consummation devoutly to be wished? But you aren’t depressed right now are you?”

“No, I’m feeling more optimistic that I have in many years. Thanks to you.”

“What’s going on Jug? Explain it to me.”

“Will you believe me?” He was hesitant. He didn’t want to burden her. Not her.

“Always.” 

He smiled and looked directly into her eyes with a level and unflinching gaze. “Let’s go out. I’ll tell you but I’d rather be somewhere else.” They left Charles to clean up the empty plates and drove over to the banks of the river again where he told her his story, as the water flowed past and the sun traced its slow arc overhead.

“It’s not so much that I want to be dead right now. It’s that I don’t think I ever will be.” He took her hands in his and looked into her eyes. “You see Betty, I’m almost two hundred and thirty years old.” She breathed in sharply in shock but it never crossed her mind to disbelieve him. It made sense. He was the reader who had annotated all of those books, more books than anyone could read in a single lifetime. He had been a friend of her great grandmother, he’d chased old Mr Keller off his property when the grandfather was just a mischievous boy.

He gave her the summary of a long, long life. Forsythe Pendleton Jones had been born near Albany in 1790. His father was a petty thief and his mother finally fled him when Forsythe was only eleven. The boy was forced to live by his wits, stealing and begging on the streets to feed himself while his father drank. He survived and eventually the dark good looks, quick wits and intelligence that had captivated Betty had drawn the eye of a young woman. Forsythe was not to know that she was a witch. She had escaped the Salem trials in the late 1600s and a hundred years later she still looked like a fresh girl of eighteen. She had seen enough burning and torture to keep her practice of the dark arts to herself but when she saw the beautiful young man, pilfering on the streets, she had to have him. There was a love potion (hers) and a deflowering (his) and she was in love. She kept him by fair means and foul for almost seven years but she knew that he would never really love her and she grew angry with his desire to be free. She packed his belongings and threw his bundle into the street with tears of rage in her eyes. As he bent to pick it up she cast the spell that had kept her young for more than a hundred years onto him. She cursed him with immortality. It used all of her power, stole her life force, and she dropped dead, a withered crone, as she murmured the end of the spell. Only the witch that casts a spell can reverse it, he learned. Joan was dead, dust in the street, before he realised what had happened. There could be no reversal. 

At first a young man could enjoy immortality. He made himself appealing to wealthy friends who would subsidise him, made canny investments in new territories, in gold, in cotton, in, as he now understood, the murder of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans and the despoiling of the country but it brought a lot of money to his coffers. To be able to drink and carouse without consequence seemed a great gift but for a clever, thoughtful man the women and the wine lost their appeal quickly. He turned to God. He would devote himself to goodness. He studied at Harvard with a plan to become a minister but as he educated himself he came to see the hypocrisy in his work. To pay to do God’s work with the suffering of his fellow man was, he saw, a dreadful evil. He gave away his money, abandoned the parish he had been assigned and lived the life of a frontiersman. When he could no longer abide the isolation and tedium he decided to devote his life to art. He wrote pretty well and lived by his pen, he painted very badly and played the piano, by his own account, like he was doing violence to it. He travelled widely, Paris, St Petersburg, Damascus, Berlin. He amassed the library that Betty knew so well. Eventually though art too lost its savour, except for literature. That always retained some appeal. He drifted home to New York, half heartedly following reports of witches in Greendale who might save him from his curse, happening upon the small town by the Sweetwater River in the 1940s. He could pass for a teenager still and so he decided that he would try youth again as a kind of joke. He made friends, enjoyed sock hops and burgers, threw himself into an American cliché. Eventually as was only natural his friends grew up, embarked upon adult lives, had children of their own. He was excluded from those pursuits, his immortality exiling him. He retreated to the fine house he had built, to his books, to solitude. He sank gradually into the depression in which Betty had first encountered him.

“Perhaps I’m not Rochester or Heathcliff but I think I might be Holden Caulfield. He’ll always be seventeen and I’ll always be twenty five. Neither of us can grow up. I can’t be around people because I never age. I have no reasonable explanation for that.”

“You just explained it to me.” 

He smiled at her and shrugged. “I just knew you’d understand. You’ve seen my library. It’s the same as living in my mind. I made the library but it made me.” He leaned towards her and kissed her, softly and she kissed him back, desperate to convey her feelings through a touch, hardly knowing what they were.

That night they went back to Wood’s Fall. The unspoken promise between them had to be fulfilled. As he unlocked the door he looked back at her. “Betty, if you were wise you’d go home right now, pack up and go back to New York. I don’t know how to bear my life, you shouldn’t have to share it. I know how selfish I’m being but I guess I’m powerless to stop myself.”

“What’s so bad about immortality Jughead? Most people are desperate to evade death.”

“Not forever Betts. It makes life so futile. “Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,” as Hamlet says. You know a football game lasts sixty minutes of play; if it lasted forever no-one would take part. No-one would care who scored. It’s death that gives life meaning. I tried the whole existential thing, assigning meaning for myself, but when you really are Sisyphus it just feels pointless.”

“But you can do such good in the world. Alleviate suffering. Help people.”

“You know sometimes you see a bee, staggering about looking stupid and half dead?” Betty nodded, perplexed. “Well you can get a little sugar water and help the bee to drink it and it will liven right up and off it buzzes. And you did a good thing, right?” She nodded. “But the bee is still just going to die anyway. Maybe it’ll even be worse than drifting off to sleep as it would have. Maybe it’ll sting a child and have its guts pulled out with the sting, maybe the child will go into anaphylaxis and die. What I’m saying is the suffering never ends. You can’t stop it. Just share it out differently. I did try. For years. It just seems to me like apathy might be the most moral choice.”

“Pleasure then,” suggested Betty. “You can fill your days with pleasure. You’ve got money, good looks, what couldn’t you have?”

“Well it sort of looks like I’m going to try that again doesn’t it? But I’m not optimistic. I want you, so much, but you’ll get old and die even if you don’t realise your mistake and leave me.” She smiled and shook her head at his low opinion of himself. “No, it’s true. I’m a depressive, solitary weirdo. You’re all sunshine and buttercups. How can that work? I don’t want to think about the pain of losing you but I’m old enough to know you don’t get pleasure without suffering, they’re two sides of the same coin. Again it’s just the distribution that varies. Oh but Betty, I think I might be able to give you some pleasure. And maybe that’ll make it worthwhile.”

Her mouth was dry at the sardonic, teasing look in his eye and her knees felt weak. “No fair Jughead. You can’t make me crazy with lust and try to get me to engage in deep conversations about the meaning of life at the same time. Let’s just put the philosophy to one side and bang shall we?”

He threw back his head and laughed at that. She loved to make him laugh, he always seemed so surprised by it. “Yes, let’s do that. Let’s fuck our way through the angst.”

She laughed too. “Now I see why you love the Beats. Don’t you have any quotations as foreplay?”

He put his mouth against her neck and whispered the lines. “The warm bodies shine together in the darkness, the hand moves to the centre of the flesh, the skin trembles in happiness and the soul comes joyful to the eye.” She felt his smile against her skin as well as his warm breath. “Is that what you had in mind?”

“Yes. That’ll do.”

He was kissing her neck and unbuttoning her shirt when something struck him and he looked up into her eyes. "Do you remember when you left me the William Carlos Williams line? Something about a poem being a universe?”

“Yes, you said keep the WCW on the following Monday. I was so happy.” She smiled at him.

“After I read that line, I dreamt of you and in the dream there was another line of his. I wasn’t brave enough to share it with you. Can I tell you it now?” She nodded, a little breathless to think of him dreaming of her. 

“It was “You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty. Shaken by your beauty. Shaken.” I was making love to you in that dream. Attendant upon you. Will you let me be attendant upon you Betty, upon your pleasure?”

She had no voice, she simply nodded and swallowed hard to try to catch her breath. He undressed her reverently. She wondered how many women he had undressed and once the thought was there she wanted to ask him but she was frightened to break the mood.

“I can hear you thinking Betty. Say it, or the noise of your thoughts are going to distract us both.” He was smiling as he reprimanded her.

“Have you had a lot of women? Has it changed?”

He was interested in the question and he paused to consider his answer. “There were times when I had a lot of women but when I came here my friends were teenagers and I was in my second century. It seemed…creepy. So I pretended not to be interested in women at all. Really I suppose I’d just become bored with it. But in Paris in the twenties, well, there were a lot of women, and some men too.” He laughed at her surprise. “Oh Betty don’t be shocked, you wouldn’t expect me to turn down Hemingway would you? And as to whether it changes… well every generation assumes the one that went before was prudish and incapable of experimental sex. Zelda Fitzgerald did some extremely surprising things to me with a champagne cork that I’m sure I never want to repeat but at least I know I’ve lived, I suppose.”

“I’m not sure if I’m turned on or intimidated,” Betty smiled and he returned to removing her clothes, kissing each area of skin he uncovered. Once he had undressed her and laid her down on a soft rug in front of those huge windows that looked out onto empty forest he took off his own clothes and she marvelled at him. His body was that of a youth, slim and athletic. His skin was flawless, no scars, unmarked by all of the living that he had done. He came and lay beside her and stroked her with long caresses from shoulder to knee. Then he took her breasts in his hands, massaging her softly and murmuring his praises. He kissed her deeply and softly and then he touched her with such skill and tenderness that she wept as she came. She wanted to do something purely for him but she wondered if he would be shocked if she took him in her mouth. Was that a thing always? When she began to place kisses on his chest and his belly she discovered that it was definitely a thing. He began to breathe more heavily, twisting his hands in her hair, trying not to thrust as she took him deeper. She touched him, holding him tenderly, then more firmly until he moaned and quivered. She was representing for the twenty first century here, he was going to have a good time. Soon she could feel that he was losing control so she was surprised when her lifted her chin and moved her off him. “I can make you come. Don’t you want that?”

“I’m an old fashioned guy Betts. I want it to happen inside you the first time. Is that ok?” She nodded. “Birth control?” he asked.

“Taken care of,” she replied and he pulled her on top of him.

“Modern life is great,” he laughed, the sound stilling in his throat as she sank onto him. He sat up, kissing her neck, stroking her sides and hips, murmuring against her breasts until he felt her rhythm become uncontrolled and then he lay back and thrust up into her, replicating her movements until she was gasping and trembling. She surprised herself by taking the initiative back from him, changing the angle, speeding up the pace and he moaned, clearly struggling on the edge of his orgasm. He thrust harder, bringing the rhythm back down and she altered the movement again, leaning backwards on him, altering how the sensation hit him. "Fuck Betty. I won't be able to hold off..." She smiled, leaned forward, her body flush against his, breasts pressing over his mouth, surrounding him. She could feel how desperately he was holding on, how out of control he felt and that excited her still further. He brought his hand down to stroke her and suddenly she was climaxing, moaning and cursing. He worked her through it and then flipped them over, knowing exactly what worked for him and within moments he was shuddering against her and making a low whining sound as he came. After a while he propped himself up on one elbow to look at her. “You’re amazing you know.”

“Back at you.” she smiled up at him.

“I just had you and I want you again. That’s not normally how I’m wired. I don’t seem to be able to get enough of you. I’m under a spell again but it’s one I never want to break.”

She had more or less moved into Wood’s Fall by the end of the month, her mother’s house up for sale and preserved like a stage set. They went into the library most days but the cataloguing tended to be forgotten as they read each other passages aloud or he passed her a book that he thought she’d like and she curled up on one of the couches with it. She loved hearing him talk about books and told him he’d be a wonderful teacher. He seemed struck by the idea. He cooked. She liked to watch him. They laughed often. At night they made love like it would stop them ever being torn apart by life and death and age and youth. One night as he juddered to his climax, his mouth against her breast he whispered “I love you, I love you, I love you,” and for the first time in his life he knew he meant it. She called out in her own pleasure and as she came down from her high she pulled his hair back so she could look into his eyes and told him that she loved him too.

The next afternoon she found a section on local folklore in the library. She called him over and asked him why he had been interested in the myths of a small town in upstate New York and he explained that he’d been trying to make sense of the tales of local witches. If he could find a friendly one then maybe they could help him in some way. It had come to nothing. Betty threw herself into the task. Times had changed since the forties and it was much easier to find witches now, just not always authentic ones. Then she remembered a story from her own school days. There was a story of a Greendale girl who, if the rumour was to be believed, had turned her boyfriend’s brother into a zombie. At the time she had dismissed the whole tale as nonsense but now she had a different perspective on what might be possible. She racked her brains for the girl’s name and came up empty but then she realised that if you had a question about a girl in Riverdale or the environs you simply asked Archie. She called him and asked if her remembered the story. “You mean Sabrina? She’s a witch y’know. Cute too. We went out a couple times. You want me to call her? What’s it about?”

“Oh, I just want to pick her brains for a story I’m researching. Local legends and stuff. It’d be great if you could put me in touch.” Betty punched the air while maintaining an even tone of voice. 

“I’ve researched your witch,” Sabrina told them with some self satisfaction when they met her at Pop’s. “Her spell wasn’t an immortality charm. Very few have the power for that and she certainly wasn’t one of them. What she had was a variant of a love spell. That seems to have been her speciality. What she cast on you Mr Jones was a spell that clever young women often used to keep their beauty until they found a husband. In those days you were considered a spinster if you weren’t married by twenty four. So you’d find a witch and she’d stop you ageing until you fell in love and your crush reciprocated the feeling. At which point you could get old and fat and grow a moustache because you had him. It shouldn’t really work for as long as it has but the intensity behind the casting of a spell matters. It can make it much more powerful. Your Joan really meant this one.”

“She died casting it,” Jughead agreed.

“That’ll do it. So all you need to do, Mr Jones, is fall in love and you’re free to get less hot everyday. It’s not much to your credit that you’ve been able to wander about the world for almost two and a half centuries unloved and unloving. Didn’t that seem a bit pointless?”

The next morning Betty was drinking coffee in his bed while he showered when he called her, excitement in his voice. “Betty, Betty. Come in here! Come here!” He was standing before the mirror, a towel wrapped around his waist, water still dripping from the planes of his chest and the tendrils of his hair. She placed a hand on his belly as she stood next to him and he looked at her in the mirror with amazement and excitement in his eyes. “Look!” he whispered in wonder, holding up one silver strand of hair. “I think I’m going to die!” He picked her up, spinning around in elation as she giggled and kissed him, delighted.

__________________________________________________________________________________

An awkward silence had fallen between the three friends as they sat by the fireplace at Wood’s Fall. Betty had expected Veronica to be irritated that she had been enticed here under false pretences with promises of girl time and daiquiris but her silent fury when Archie arrived had been unexpected. Betty hoped that Jug would be home soon before V called a cab and left. Betty tried to make conversation about Archie’s graduation ceremony and she did, at least, have the good grace to congratulate him and tell him that she’d always known he could do it. Then Betty heard the bike outside and a few moments later he was there, diffusing the tension as he threw his leather messenger bag onto the floor and strode over to Betty. He bent to place a tender kiss on her forehead and then bent further to place another on her belly. Veronica’s perfect eyebrows shot up and her mouth opened. “Betty!” She gasped.

“We’ll talk about that later.”Betty said firmly and Archie looked from one to the other of the women in confusion.

“About what?” He asked. Poor Archie always trying to keep up. Even V smiled indulgently. It was just so Archie.

Jug threw himself onto the couch next to Betty. “Sweet Jesus. Undergrads, foetuses with Wikipedia. They’re impossible.” 

Veronica sighed.“Tell us how you really feel Jones.”

Betty raised an eyebrow at her friend. “In this house we encourage Juggy to speak his truth. Don’t we Jug? Because we aren’t at home...”

“To Mr Sulky.” Jug finished for her, grinning and bopping her on the nose with his index finger.

“So, now Herr Professor is home can you explain why you’ve tried this cut price parent trap nonsense on us?” V snarked. Archie looked a little more hopeless every time she spoke.

“Well, Betty thinks that it might help you if I told you the meaning of life.”Jug said, with no trace of a joke. V laughed anyway.

“What makes you think that you know the meaning of life Jones?”

Jug looked around himself and made a general gesture, “Well, just everything really.” He grinned.

“You really are the smuggest man,” she sighed.

“I’m going to tell you my life story and we’re hoping that it might convince you that I know what I’m talking about, on this if nothing else,” he said with unusual sincerity. And then he did just that. When he’d finished Archie was staring at him dumbstruck but Veronica looked both sceptical and unimpressed.

“Archie, you aren’t believing this are you? I’ve no idea why he’s scamming us and why Betty’s letting him but even you have to be smarter than this.”

“Betty said you were going to be a tough nut to crack. Time for my family photographs.” Jug reached behind the couch and pulled out a dusty album and proceeded to show Veronica the daguerrotype he had made when he got his degree from Harvard, the sepia toned studio portrait he sat for in New York before he left for Europe in 1890, a black and white Kodak snapshot at a cafe in Paris in the 1920’s, a series of small square faded colour pictures with a group of teenagers at a table in what was surely Pop’s. In all of them Jug was unmistakably himself. “If you want to take them and have them analysed then feel free but take care. I don’t want to be disappeared by the government and Roswell alien autopsied.” 

Veronica was silent, stunned. “And you believe all this?” she asked Betty.

“I know it. I know him. He’s 234 next birthday. I dig older guys.” Betty grinned at her and leant into Jug’s shoulder as he put his arm around her.

“So anyway the point of telling you all that was to say that I spent decades, centuries really, trying to find out what it was all about, trying to find purpose. And I couldn’t. Now I have. I’m so goddamn lucky. I have this amazing house, money to do as I please and help other people, a job that interests me, despite the undergrads…but I would willingly give it all up tomorrow because the only thing that matters in the world is this woman. And if I lost her then that would be terrible but not as terrible as not having known her. Love is what matters. Everything else is white noise. I hated Joan for a long time because she had condemned me to life but now, more and more, I think I misjudged her. She knew I was incapable of love as I was and she gave up her life to give me time to become capable of it. She didn’t know quite how slow I’d be.”

“Issues of consent though Jug,” Betty protested gently.

“Yeah, fair enough. Spells aren’t as good as therapy but they were different times Betts. Anyway, I’ve had my say. It’s up to you what you do with it.”

“There’s one other thing guys. While you’re here.” Betty added. “We thought we’d get married tomorrow. Do you want to be our witnesses?”

There was a courthouse wedding with just the four of them followed by burgers at Pop’s. When the newlyweds made their farewells and headed towards home they were pleased to see that Archie and Veronica were still deep in conversation, trying to work out why they were alive.


End file.
